Page modified:
08/18/2004

Introduction

Within the last two decades, new ways of thinking about complex interacting systems have emerged from fields as diverse as physics, population dynamics, mathematics, earth sciences, economics, biology, and computer science.

These new paradigms are characterized by the growing conviction that many of the important properties of natural systems cannot be understood from studying the individual system components in isolation nor from a top-down, reductionist approach. Rather, these new approaches are distinguished from more traditional ones by the notion that these important properties are "emergent" attributes of the system as a whole.

Coherent large-scale spatial and temporal patterns exhibited by complex nonlinear systems for instance, result from a myriad of small-scale interactions and are often repeated across many scales of time and distance. Examples of these patterns include: great damaging earthquakes on geological fault systems; stock market crashes; the rise and fall of governments and civilizations; and the marvelous self-organizing patterns of cognition now known to exist within the human brain.